Putin’s Russia Hits the ‘Clear’ Button on the Medvedev Era

It started right after he surrendered the Russian presidency to Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin reversed his predecessor’s decision to decriminalize slander, made just eight months earlier. He raised the retirement age for top officials to 70, foiling Mr. Medvedev’s attempt to “rejuvenate” Russia’s government by imposing an age limit of 60, or 65 in special cases.

On Thursday, lawmakers began the process of revisiting yet another modest change from Mr. Medvedev’s constrained presidency: his decision last year to end the practice of changing the time twice a year, moving Russia permanently to summer time. The bill’s sponsor did not mince words, saying Mr. Medvedev’s decision was “absolutely unacceptable for a huge part of” Russia.

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, journalists could tell a political figure had fallen out of favor by deciphering a sort of bureaucratic code: an article in Pravda would appear, pointing at “drawbacks” in his rule, or his spot on the Red Square receiving line would drift toward the back. If it got really bad, he would be airbrushed out of group photographs.

While it has not reached that point for Mr. Medvedev, the four and a half months since he left the presidency have brought a pointed departure from the course he set. The words “reset” or “modernization” are seldom mentioned, privatization of state-owned companies is in doubt and the direct gubernatorial elections Mr. Medvedev reinstated as a parting gesture have been weakened by the insertion of a Kremlin-controlled screening process for the candidates.

Criticism of Mr. Medvedev has begun to appear in mainstream outlets. Thursday’s news about the time change seemed like more of the same. “So in winter it will not get light an hour later, and in summer it will get dark an hour earlier — all this with only one goal: so that Mr. Medvedev, greeting the early dusk, will remember that he is nobody,” wrote the journalist Mikhail Fishman on Facebook.

To mark the occasion, the political consultant Gleb O. Pavlovsky coined the term “de-Medvedevization.”

It is too early to write off Mr. Medvedev, who recently turned 47. He is now prime minister and remains the leader of the governing United Russia party and the second-most-important politician in the country. A year ago he demonstrated his loyalty to Mr. Putin by walking away from a second term, and Mr. Putin is known to reward loyalty. All in all, this summer felt less like a decisive change of course than a period of frenetic transition, without a clear plan waiting at the end.

Still, there were unmistakable signs that Mr. Medvedev was being cut down to size, starting on the fourth anniversary of the August 2008 war with Georgia. That event had lifted his popularity greatly, and each anniversary he reminisced on television about the tough, solitary decision he made to send the army into Georgia while Mr. Putin was away in Beijing.

This year’s retrospectives were driven by the appearance of an anonymous documentary film in which retired generals excoriated Mr. Medvedev as timorous and cowardly. Mr. Putin, asked about the video, responded by turning Mr. Medvedev’s narrative upside down, telling journalists that he had personally approved plans for the assault in advance, and that during the crisis he spoke repeatedly by phone to Mr. Medvedev and the Defense Ministry.

Another blow fell on Mr. Medvedev a few weeks later. While still president, he asked prosecutors to review the case of Taisiya Osipova, an opposition activist who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison on what her supporters said were fabricated drug charges. His complaint led to a reversal and retrial, in which prosecutors sought a more modest sentence of four years.

In August the judge, in a highly unusual move, sentenced Ms. Osipova to twice that time.

Alexander Rahr, a Russia scholar and author of a biography of Mr. Putin, said hard-liners around Mr. Putin blamed Mr. Medvedev for the burst of dissent that shook the Kremlin last winter. According to this critique, Mr. Medvedev’s presidency ended the “climate of fear” created during Mr. Putin’s second presidential term. Though Mr. Medvedev did not push through significant structural change, influential insiders contend that he “created an atmosphere” that led to protests, Mr. Rahr said.

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“They are furious,” he said. “They think Medvedev woke up this new Russian revolution.”

Konstantin Remchukov, the editor in chief of the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, says the political chill that set in this summer is familiar to anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union.

He counted 30 months of easing political constraints, starting with the publication of Mr. Medvedev’s essay “Forward, Russia” — in essence, a critique of his predecessor’s record — and ending with Mr. Putin’s inauguration in May.

“When you have a situation more or less your whole life with very little periods of thaw, you can’t treat it seriously,” Mr. Remchukov said. “I remember all these periods of being more warm, cooler, frosty.”

In a way, the biggest surprise is that Mr. Putin has found it necessary to roll back Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives in the first place.

For the four years of the “tandem” arrangement, the consensus among Western experts was that Mr. Medvedev did not do much without specific approval from Mr. Putin. On the day the two men announced they would switch places, a top Obama administration official shrugged off a query about whether this would herald a change of course in foreign policy: “Everyone knows that Putin runs Russia,” the official said.

That seems less obvious now. Mr. Putin set about reviewing or reversing a long list of policies after his inauguration: relations with Japan and Belarus suddenly grew friendlier, for example, while relations with Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, took a dive. Igor Bunin, who leads Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies, said that Mr. Putin had already reshuffled the Interior Ministry, moving several close friends of Mr. Medvedev’s to advisory positions, and that the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, might be replaced for the same reason.

All this suggests that many of Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives toward the end of his presidency, sporadic and incomplete as they were, were undertaken independently, and in some cases against Mr. Putin’s wishes. Though his talk about change was generally not accompanied by action, the Russian presidency is so powerful that for four years, Mr. Medvedev needed only to speak and the system began to work to promote his ideas. That time, however, is over.

“Even the time change; just everything Medvedev touched,” Mr. Remchukov said. “This is the most sad story now, when I see that even minor things they are trying to eradicate from our reality.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2012, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Putin’s Russia Punches the ‘Clear’ Button on the Medvedev Era. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe